The opening ‘Hora lungă’ (Slow Song) is played on a single string – the C – and enchants with its folksong-like melody. As usual with Ligeti, nothing is what it seems: the melody is artificial, the folksy atmosphere soon disrupted by microtonal incursions. That first movement and the concluding ‘Chaconne chromatique’ were written for Tabea Zimmermann, whose 1997 recording remains the benchmark for all rivals, but Kashkashian is just as convincing, her tempi more measured than Knox (at under 20 minutes, too swift), Power and Tamestit, her tone far more grateful to hear than Strosser. The remaining four movements mix fiery pyrotechnics and emotionally complex memorials of which Kashkashian is a fine interpreter.
She is even more on her mettle in György Kurtag’s 19-movement collection Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (‘Signs, Games and Messages’), started in 1989 (using some pieces begun even earlier) and still being added to, though since 2001 only revisions have been made, no new pieces.Guy Rickards, Gramophone

Violist Kim Kashkashian has been an eloquent and impassioned champion of the music for her instruments for decades now. But this new solo CD - which got a well-deserved Grammy nomination this month – finds her at the peak of her expressive and technical powers, playing music for unaccompanied viola by two of the great contemporary masters, György Kurtág and György Ligeti. It’s a terrific pairing of two linked but complementary sensibilites, matching Kurtág’s terse, aphoristic style with Ligeti’s more expansive and playful creative personality. [...] Kashkashian’s superb performances revel in the elusiveness of both pieces, bringing dark timbre and rhythmic fluidity to both in equal measure.Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle

When András Schiff first recorded the ‚48’ a quarter of a century ago, the outcome was a gift to those in search of Bach on the piano without the idiosyncrasies of Glenn Gould or the suffocating monumentality of Rosalyn Tureck. Aware, though never a card-carrying member, of the ‘historically informed’ movement, Schiff pushed at a door that has admitted the likes of Murray Perahia and Angela Hewitt – pianists first, but with a sense of period style.
That Schiff Decca set remains a model of sovereign intelligence, limpid playfulness and pianism, but in revisiting the Well-Tempered Clavier he has said that he wants to eliminate touches of sentimentality. The result feels more like an evolution than a rejection of his youthful preoccupations. The ornamentation is less exuberant, the rubato less intrusive, and Schiff is more determined to let Bach’s music speak for itself.
But ‘speak’ is the wrong verb, Schiff’s Bach sings and dances, and has a clarity derived from a mesmerising touch and an aversion to the sustain pedal. The crucial organic relationship he establishes between prelude and fugue, meanwhile, remains unimpeachable – even when constrasting the ‘French’ delicacy of Book 2’s C sharp minor Prelude with the irrisistible vigour of its Fugue. Schiff’s new set doesn’t replace the old; it complements it.Paul Riley, BBC Music Magazine

Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Christian Reiner's reading of the Turmgedichte by German poet Hölderlin

Duni sings in Albanian, but though these Balkan melodies are reclaimed with scrupulous care, her technique runs from flawlessly pitched, hymnlike incantations to swerving wordless improv in the style of Norma Winstone or Sidsel Endresen, while her partnership with Swiss pianist Colin Vallon’s trio enhances the discreet subtleties of her jazz sensibility. An early track such as the solemnly pulsing Kjani trima is traditional, but Duni shifts from a melodious suppleness to skimming improvisation in the more emphatic Kur Te Kujtosh, and becomes turbulently emotional over Vallon’s sinister banging chords after the tranquil beginnings of Vajze e Valeve. [...] This quartet definitely sound like rising star material for ECM.John Fordham, The Guardian

British magazine Jazz Journal on Nik Bärtsch's Ronin and their album Live

The three ECM studio albums from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin have all been precise, calibrated affairs, every insistent, repetitive note in perfect rhythmic order. So how will this pinpoint music translate into a live setting? This set, recorded at eight different venues over the course of two years, provides the answer, which is very well indeed. It helps that the five musicians have been working together for a decade – new bass player Tomy Jordi debuts on just the final track – and that this material has been honed over countless performances. But the group brings an urgency to its live appearances that has been sometimes absent from its studio work.Simon Adams, Jazz Journal

Reviewers in Germany and England are fascinated by the way Eberhard Weber transformed solo parts from his concerts with the Jan Garbarek Group into his new album Résumé

For this project, Weber has reworked a selection of improvised bass solos recorded with Garbarek between 1990 and 2007 into a coherent 12-track story, enhanced by new instrumental effects and subsequent contributions from Garbarek and percussionist Michael DiPasqua. The singing, sliding sound of Weber’s electric upright instrument now calls across pizzicato-strings vamps or deep orchestral hums, or twangs and swerves around its own echoed countermelodies. Garbarek’s contributions are thoughtful and tender (including some ethereal flute on Bath), and DiPasqua adds a heartracing intensity to the fast-moving Bochum and dramatic cymbal flourishes to the rich-textured Lazise.John Fordham, The Guardian